


Gun to your head

by WritingPains



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Dark, Dark Wanda, Hurt Tony Stark, POV Tony Stark, Tony Feels, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, mental manipulation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-28
Updated: 2019-06-28
Packaged: 2020-05-28 08:50:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19390675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WritingPains/pseuds/WritingPains
Summary: Tony is having a rough time.It gets worse when a crazed gunman breaks into the tower and holds Tony hostage.It's worse because none of the Avengers seem to care.





	Gun to your head

Tony is working. He’s _always_ working. He needs to upgrade the team’s weapons, fend off the media, run the charities, invent stock for S.I. And keep his kids (AKA, his robots) up to date. He’s rarely able to get out of the workshop, but these days it feels less like a challenge and more like an excuse to not go upstairs.

A divide the size of the Mariana trench has appeared between him and the team. He’s not sure what kicked it off, exactly. Probably Ultron, likely the mess with Wanda. She hates him, and she isn’t afraid to show it. Tony can’t stand to be in the same room with her, not when it would only take a flick of her fingers to send him spiralling into his worst possible nightmare. Since she stepped foot in the tower, Tony hasn’t been able to have a conversation with a single Avenger that wasn’t interrupted with a scoff or a sly comment about how he’s a murderer with an ego the size of Australia.

So, Tony keeps well out of her way. If it means he can’t see the team, then so be it. He doesn’t need to be around them to be a fundamental part of the team. He still needs to make the gear, still needs to go out on missions, still has to pay the bills and run a business that funds the Avengers Initiative.

“Boss, my protocols demand that I inform you that you’ve been down here for nearing on fifty hours. According to numerous studies conducted by doctors across the world, your cognitive functions will be impeded, and you’re far more likely to get an injury if you continue.”

Tony can’t stop the flinch that comes from hearing her voice. Every day is a reminder of what he lost, and he’s expected not to grieve, because to the team, J.A.R.V.I.S was simply a defence reliance, but for Tony, he was everything. His assistant, his friend, in some ways he was a son and possibly the one person who cared about him more than Rhodey and Pepper. Having him close meant the world to him, and now that he’s gone there’s a hole in Tony’ heart and his workshop.

“Don’t you worry, doll,” Tony says, “I’m fine.”

“I’ll contest that fact, simply because you just drank motor oil instead of coffee and didn’t react.”

Tony looks down at the black sludge in the cup next to him and then glares at DUM-E. F.R.I.D.A.Y is right. He is too tired to really notice anything, but it’s currently daytime and going upstairs would involve stopping off at the lounge. Steve and Clint had inexplicably taken to using his couch when they needed to get away from the team, peace and quiet they said, so Tony can never really avoid them if they’re up there, and he doesn’t have it in him to deny them access.

“Fine.”

Tony huffs a breath and stands up, only to immediately fall back down, his head swimming with fatigue. If anything, it’s more motivation to just take a nap on the couch, but he knows that F.R.I.D.A.Y has her own tactics to get him into a real bed, where he can sleep properly.

After a few breaths, hoping to encourage the oxygen going to his brain, he tries again.

“Fri, when did I last eat?”

“A substantial meal?”

“Yeah, let’s go with that.”

“Twenty-seven hours.”

“I should eat.”

“You should.”

Tony paces the lab for a few seconds, trying to figure out what to do.

“Fri, are Steve and Clint on my floor?”

“Affirmative, boss.”

“Damn. What about the communal area?”

“Wanda, Sam, and Natasha.”

So, Tony thinks, I can’t go anywhere inside my own home for something to eat.

“I’ll eat tomorrow. I can’t… I’ll just wait.”

Friday withholds judgement and Tony makes his way to the elevator. The instant he steps in, however, he feels that something is wrong. It’s not until the doors close, and it starts to move that he realises he left his watch on the workshop, and he feels more vulnerable than ever before. Is that the cause of this feeling?

No.

No, because of less than fifteen seconds later, the doors open again, admitting a stranger into the small cabin. Tony stares at the man, and the man smirks back.

“Fri, haven’t we talked about letting strangers into the elevator with daddy?”

Silence.

“Friday?”

“Your pet AI is offline for now,” the man smiles. “It’s just you and me.”

And a gun, Tony’s mind supplies as the man pulls the weapon from his jacket and shoves it into Tony’s stomach.

“What do you want?”

“You,” the man says as though the answer was obvious. “It’s always been you, Stark.”

“Is this like, a sexual thing because—”

“No,” he hisses, moving closer to Tony. “This is about me taking you.”

Tony fights to steady his breath, panic fighting its way out of his body.

“What your plan from here? Shoot me? Force me to leave the building? I’m afraid that no one will think me leaving with a strange person at this time is going to go unnoticed.”

“I’ve considered that. That’s why we’re not going to leave the tower. We’re going to wait for your teammates to try and save you.”

Tony laughs. He can’t help it. The man must be cracked if he thinks that any of the Avengers would try to rescue him. None of them has the incentive for a start. Sure, on the field, they have each other’s backs. Even Wanda has pulled him out of a dangerous situation before, but she wasted no time in explaining that she only did it because there were cameras everywhere. She did it to save face, to look like a good member of the team. None of them would hesitate to let Tony get shot when there’s no threat of bad press.

Sam might be the only reprieve he has from the entire situation, which is a surprise considering how far up Caps arse he is. He doesn’t live in the tower, and when he sees Tony, he’s cordial with a hint of friendliness. Sadly, Tony has learnt to take what he can get.

“You must be broken,” Tony guffaws.

“You have so little faith in your team. Let’s see if it’s justified.”

The elevator begins moving again, and the man walks around Tony, putting an arm around his neck and holding a gun to the small of his back.

Without being told where to go, the doors open on Tony’s floor. Clint and Steve look up lazily and then double take when they see what’s happening. Tony gives them a wave, though his hands are shaking too much for him to give off a casual look.

“Stark, what’s happening?” Clint asks, jumping up from his place of the sofa, his video game character dying a horrible death without his ministrations.

“Um, not much. I think, _think_ , I’m being taken, hostage.”

Steve looks from Tony to the man, calculating something that Tony can’t figure out. Neither of the other Avengers has weapons, and with the man so close to Tony, it would be difficult to take him out otherwise.

“Did you have to take him hostage in the tower?” Clint asks, bored already. “I mean, I was so close to beating the boss on this thing.”

Steve looks from Clint to the screen and his face twinges in sympathy.

“Let’s bring up the rest of the team,” the man suggests. “See if they think more about their teammate than they do a video game.”

Tony squirms, his back seizing for the position he’s forced to stand in. He really doesn’t want to be held there, staring at his disinterested once-friends, with a cold, hard gun to his back.

“They won’t care any more than these guys do,” Tony whispers.

“I know,” the man says, and even though Tony can’t see him, he hears the smile on his face.

“What’s going on?” Nat asks as they come up the stairway.

“Some loser has a gun to Stark,” Clint complains as he picks up the controller again.

The other three team members move towards the sofa, coming into Tony’s view. Wanda stands behind them all, a poorly hidden smile lighting up her eyes.

“I’ll fix this,” Wanda says with a dark, twisted smile.

“Careful,” Sam warns, the only one to look genuinely worried. “One wrong move and Stark gets hurt.”

“And then who will fix our stuff?” Clint mocks.

Sam looks at Clint, shocked.

“Clint, what the hell, man?”

Tony hurts. It’s not just the gun or the looks, but the way that Clint said it, the undertone of hard-hitting truth knocking Tony’s desire to come out of the situation off its pedestal.

They _hate_ Tony.

“Kill me.”

The pressure of the gun lessons.

“Tony, No!” Sam cries.

Wanda looks furious now, her frown aimed at Sam.

“If that’s what’s he wants,” she shrugs, “then why not?”

Tony says, resigned to his fate. When did we things get so bad? When did the team hate him so much that they’d rather see him dead than save him?

The depression from the realisation is crushing, and his heart aches. He can feel the intensity of Wanda’s gaze on his, and her smile turns nasty and cutting.

With a flick of her wrist, a burning pain rips through his stomach. Tony collapses to the ground the sound of a gunshot and a scream. It sounds more like a woman than Tony, but the pain takes him down, and his on the floor.

“Wanda!” everyone screams.

“Tony!” the stranger and Sam cry simultaneously.

And then, nothing.

~

Tony’s mid I’m working at the speed of a turtle walking through molasses. His thoughts are half former because, by the time he gets a partial image in his head, he gets bored of it and moves onto the next.

The images he is greeted with are dark. It’s all Wanda manipulating him into killing the team, or Wanda getting into his head and spilling his secrets, or Wanda getting the team to kill him. He doesn’t like those thoughts. He wants them gone.

“Tony, you awake, man?”

Sam? Tony can’t imagine a single reason that Sam would be in a room that Tony is sleeping in, so he has to force himself into reluctant wakefulness.

“Can you open your eyes?”

He can, but the lights are too bright, and they burn.

“I’ll dim the lights—oh, or Friday will. Thanks, Friday.”

Tony opens his eyes again, and the lights no longer assault his senses. He still squints though, everything appearing fuzzy and glowy.

“You’re on some pretty heavy drugs right now,” Sam explains.

“Why?”

Stricken panic flits across Sam’s face, and instantly, Tony knows something terrible has happened, something that requires him to be more alert than he currently feels. He tries, unsuccessfully, to sit up and pull out the IV that is pumping him full of crap that is clouding his mind. Sam, however, is too quick. He grabs Tony’s wrist, though it’s gentle, and pushes Tony back into the cushions.

“You need to just lay there,” Sam advises. “Pepper and Rhodey are on their way. They’re, um, they pretty piss right now, man.”

“Why?”

Sam flounders, looking around the room for some help, but there is nothing. He turns back to Tony, a solemn look on his face.

“Wanda has had her claws in everyone’s mind since the day she moved in,” Sam begins. “She’s been slowly manipulating everyone, growing their hatred for you and slowly turning them against you.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, and things came to a head last week when a gunman came in and held a gun to your back and threatened to kill you if no one did anything to rescue you. And, well, no one did. In fact, Wanda actively forced the man to shoot you.”

“Oh,” Tony says again, not fully understanding.

“Except, the thing is, the bullet went through you and struck Wanda too.”

Tony blinks once, twice, and then looks around the room again.

“They’re angry at me for getting her killed,” Tony guesses.

“No! Jesus, no. No, they’re just… Shield has called them all in for a psychological evaluation.”

“And Wanda?”

“Dead.”

“Oh.”

Sam rocks up onto the back of his feet and swallows audibly. Tony wonders if he’s supposed to feel something. Anger at the events of the last few weeks? Relief that they never actually hated him? Sadness that Wanda had died?

“The team are on their way back,” Friday announces.

“Do you want to see them?” Sam asks.

Tony looks at him, glazed eyes and smart mouth that is failing him for the first time in years. He can’t even think, can’t also talk, he has no idea. Does he want to see them? Would it make a difference, since he’s too drugged up to have a proper conversation?

“Friday, hold off on visitors for now. And ask the doctor if this dosage of drugs is as high as it needs to be.”

Tony never figures out whether the doctor replied, because the moment Sam’s back turns, Tony slips back asleep.

~

“Tony?”

Tony groans, not ready to wake up yet. He’d been dreaming about something, something sweet, and he didn’t want to have to leave it behind. But the voice is persistent, and it aches at Tony. He feels sick with the want to see the person talking.

But waking up isn’t easy. He’s tired. His eyelids weighed a thousand tons. His body felt pleasantly warm to the point that he worried any movement would cause him to lose the feeling forever.

“Tony, come on, Sam said you were awake.”

“K,” Tony slurs. “M’up.”

“Yeah, yeah, obviously. Come on, let me so those beautiful eyes.”

“Quit be’in weird, Rhodey,” Tony whines, though he’s smiling.

“Not until you quit being asleep.”

“Loser,” Tony complains, opening his eyes.

The lights are low, but there’s a glow behind the blinds that suggests its daytime. When Tony tries to get a good look at the clock, he finds that there isn’t one. Rhodey smirks at him and then sits in the chair next to the bed.

“It’s four in the afternoon,” he says, kicking his feet up on the bed. “3rd of August.”

Tony stares at him incredulously.

“What? A week? I’ve been… Jesus. What happened?”

“You don’t remember?”

Tony shrugs, feeling more awake now than before. The movement pulls at something on his stomach, and he lurches forward, hands flying to a wound on his stomach. The excess movement makes it hurt more, and Rhodey is shouting at him to _stop_ _moving,_ but Tony isn’t listening. He pulls up the front of his hospital gown, not caring that he’s revealing more than he maybe should. Rhodey’s seen worse.

“I was _shot_.”

“You were. Fortunately, you survived.”

“Wanda didn’t,” Tony says.

“No.”

“Should I feel bad?”

“That her plan backfired and got her killed? That she turned the entire team against you after you invited her into your home? What do you want to feel bad about?”

The fury glowing in Rhodey’s eyes shouldn’t warm Tony as much as it does. For the last few months, he’s felt so alone and so uncared for, that to have someone in his corner for once feels like such a relief.

“Are the… are they pissed at me?”

“Sam said you asked that already. I think they’re a little stupefied. None of them is really able to notice a difference in themselves, other than they hated you one day and didn’t the next. It was a slow thing. After you got shot, Wanda’s hold over them fell, and they came around eventually.”

Tony nods. He’s not entirely sure what to do with himself, and Rhodey seems to accept that.

“She can’t hurt you anymore,” Rhodey promises. “And I’m sorry I wasn’t here to help.”

“Not your fault,” Tony says. “It’s no one’s but hers.”

“Good. Remember that.”

Rhodey stays for a few hours, talking to Tony about mundane things, not complaining when Tony’s tenusous grasp on his consciousness slips.

“I’ll come back later, Tones, OK?”

Tony nods, too tired to make words. The ache in his stomach is barely noticeable through the haze of drugs now, and he’s grateful for it. If he can avoid pain, he’ll never not be thankful for that. Plus, a gunshot wound through his stomach could have ended much worse.

A doctor comes in not long after Rhodey leaves. Tony inquires about his injuries and is relieved to hear that he’s expected to make a full recovery. The only problem Tony can find is the month long recovery period, during which time he’s expected to stay on bed rest.

“We’ll be enforcing that,” comes a voice that causes Tony’s body to jolt.

“Nat,” Tony breathes in shock.

“Sorry it took us so long to visit.”

Tony looks passed Nat’s stiff form and see’s Clint and Steve standing on either side of her. Sam hovers in the background and he gives Tony a pained smile, like he knows that maybe there will never be a good time for this to happen, but that it needs to happen at some point.

“Hey,” Tony awkwardly waves.

When no one says anything, Tony feels the tension rising, growing so thick that it’s hard to breath. He can’t be there. He can’t be in the room with these people. What if it _wasn’t_ Wanda’s mental manipulation? What if they’re coming to admit that they’ve always truly hated him, and that small amount of relief he’d allowed himself is going to come back to haunt him.

“Ho, woah, what’re you doing?” Clint cries out, coming to push Tony back into the pillows. “Bed rest kind of involves mandatory _bed_ , dude.”

Tony allows himself to be wrangled back down, but his eyes, filled with suspicion flit from one person to the other. He allows Sam a pass, since he’s always been civil towards Tony, boardering on kidness. The others haven’t extended anything of the sort since Wanda, and even before her, any bonds he attempted to forge with his teammates was held in a tenuous grasp.

“We’re sorry,” Cap says, sincerity ripe in his voice.

“We all are,” Nat agrees.

Tony wants to tell them that it’s not their fault, that it would be unfair to expect them to apologise for having their minds messed with, but he can’t help but feel a small sense of relief at their words. He’d be lying if hearing them acknowledge it didn’t set his mind at ease.

“I guess I can forgive you,” Tony shrugs, ignoring the way it pulls at his stitches.

“You don’t have to do that, Tony,” Clint says, putting a hand on his shoulder. “You can be angry. We are, but I’m not ever sure we fought against it. I guess she played on some underlying feelings we all had and excaserbated them.”

Tony’s heart clenches, but he raises an eyebrow like it doesn’t affect him.

“So, you secretly hated me, and it took that witch to get you to come to terms with that?”

He sounds like he’s joking, but Clint cringes.

“I mean, I had my reservations. I won’t lie to you. I rarely saw you outside of your lab, and when I did, you always gave off this – I dunno – aura? Like, you didn’t act any different than how I saw you in the tabloids. I genuinely found that you as Tony and you as Ironman were two different people, and that was hard for me to understand. I didn’t hate you, I just didn’t get you. She harvested that and just blew it up into something else.”

This is, without a doubt, the most the two of them have ever spoken since they moved into the tower. Clint, he feels, is at least honest. He could have lied and placed all the blame on Wanda, but he took responsibility, and that means more to Tony than he had thought it would.

The next few weeks were agonizing. Tony had to get accustomed to the new relationship he had with the other Avengers. It was like a whole new paradigm, one he had only experienced with Rhodey and Pepper. It was disconcerting, but warming.

Eventually, after getting out of the damned hospital bed, the others became helicopter parents, checking on him whenever they could find an excuse to. They’d hang with him in the lab, bring him food, drag him to bed – or carry him, in Steve’s case – and they got to know each other better.

News about Wanda was kept on the downlow, the only information fed to the media being that she suffered a mental breakdown and her powers took her own life. As SHEILD launched an investigation, and the man who came in the tower was thoroughly interrogated, it came to light that he had no idea who Wanda was, but didn’t remember leaving his house that morning. He’d apparently broken down in interrogation, saying that he didn’t even _own_ a gun, and Tony had looked into him. He was a supporter of stricter gun laws and never even let his kids play with toy guns.

They came to the join decision that Wanda had forced him into committing the crime, and they man was released under the promise that he would never speak a word of it. Tony sent the man money as compensation for his troubles, more than enough for his children’s college funds, and that weight was taken off of his shoulders.

Pepper and Rhodey got into a habit of visiting more often, griping about how Tony can’t be left alone, since he refusing to seek help when he needs it. They were monumentally pissed when they learnt the extent of Wanda’s disturbance, and begged him to tell them why he didn’t reach out when it got that bad.

Tony promises that in the future, he’ll talk more, but they all know it’s a weak promise. Tony is, and always has been, an independent individual who prefers to deal with his problems on his own, even if the ‘dealing’ involves a whole lot of ignoring a problem when it comes to himself being negatively affected.

But things get better. And that’s all that counts, really. That he knows he has people, and that he may never have to suffer from the pain wrought from being alone again.

He’ll take what he can get.

**Author's Note:**

> Just wanted to write Evil Wanda.  
> Hope you enjoy!


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